Customizing a user interface for a telephony device and/or application to suit better a user's preferences is well known in the art. Generally, the user customizes the user interface simply by moving icons, setting preferences, and the like. The basic structure and/or features of the device and/or application remains static based on the assumption that at least a portion of the user interface is a one-size-fits-all situation.
The nature of the work done by a given user fundamentally differs from role to role and among users by profession to profession. The user's effectiveness and convenience can be enhanced significantly by analyzing the way a user performs his work and more significantly change the way a device works. For example, a sales professional heavily relies on his contact manager to manage effectively his customer base. He/she further needs to know current product information, availability, and pricing and what key events are upcoming in the short term. By contrast, an engineering professional needs to know the current status of projects and products that she/he is working on and have information ready at hand about what the next deliverable is.
A user may be more functionally driven with regard to the use of a telephony device. For example, one user is a remote services professional and desires a graphical depiction of the architecture that they are working on complete with an overlay of error messages and a palette of choices about what spares exist on site or what unloaded software patches exist. Another user is an agent in a contact center and needs to pull up past orders (e.g., current products owned) and display additions and/or changes implied by a submitted request for proposal. Specialized computers, such as those for specific functions like remote servicing and computing, are not integrated completely for both communications and computing.
Mashups are fast replacing portals as a means for combining and presenting information to a user. A mashup is a Web page or application that uses and combines data, presentation, and/or functionality from two or more sources to create a new service. Mashups are generally client applications or hosted online and can easily and inexpensively produce enriched results using open Application Program Interfaces (“APIs”) and data sources in a previously unforeseen or unanticipated manner.
Mashup use is expanding in the business environment. Business mashups are useful for integrating business and data services, as business mashup's technologies provide the ability to develop new integrated services quickly, to combine internal services with external or personalized information, and to make these services tangible to the business user through user-friendly Web browser interfaces. Business mashups differ from consumer mashups primarily in the level of integration with business computing environments, security, and access control features, governance, and the sophistication of the programming tools (mashup editors) used. Another difference between business mashups and consumer mashups is a growing trend of using business mashups in commercial software as a service offering.
Telecommunications have been slow to adopt mashup technologies and Service Oriented Architectures (“SOA”) to integrate and make available disparate data as discrete Web services or applications. A company called “Ifbyphone” and others have made use of the concept of a “telecommunications mashup” by linking direct response phone call data with web advertising data and reporting the result via Google Analytics. The Ifbyphone system effectively provides the byproduct data of how effective the web advertising campaign is by jointly displaying the data associated with direct response phone calls. The direct response phone call data is captured by use of a well known system called a voice-based, form filler application. The output of the form filler application is mapped to a specific web advertising campaign such that correlation between the cause (web advertising) and effect (direct response phone call) can be displayed and analyzed via the Google Analytics tool. The logic to combine the web page information with the form filler information and output the combined result into Google Analytics (or any other output display format) is a very simple telecommunications mashup.
Although phone mashups offer a number of benefits, their use has been relatively limited, both in scope and capabilities.